Make Your Own Children's Museum

My kids love to visit children's museums. Our family favorites are Kohl's Children's Museum in suburban Chicago and the Discovery Center in Rockford. But those fun places are about an hour away from our house. When we have a chance to go to a museum, the kids spend most of their time in the imaginative play centers.  These are the areas set up to look like baby nurseries, kitchens, pizza parlors, grocery stores, and construction sites.  And really, there's not a lot to these sets ups.  They use kid-sized elements to replicate grown-up life.  With a little creativity, it's pretty easy to set up an imaginative play center at home.

Avery's favorite imaginative play at home is the baby hospital or pediatrician's office. We gather her baby dolls, baby blankets, baby bottles, bowls, spoons, wash cloths, Ace bandages, Q-tips, cotton balls, ice packs, heating pads, and a pretend doctor's kit. We lay out the blankets as hospital beds and put a baby on each bed. We also add clipboards and a phone for extra realism. We bathe the baby's and dress fake wounds. We take temperatures, blood pressures, check heartbeats, give shots and medicine. It's a lot of fun for a wintery morning.

We have done the same thing with a veterinarian's office, a grocery store, and a restaurant. It is especially fun to set this up after your kids go to bed and surprise them with it in the morning. It starts the day off in a fun way and gets their imaginations working early. I don't play with them the whole time, but I get them started and jump in from time to time to add new ideas. I might answer the phone and tell the "doctors" about new cases arriving. I might start cleaning a baby's cut and let the kids take over. I might examine a baby and notice a new injury or a fever. This helps kids come up with story ideas that they can use later on their own.

The pictures below show our most recenct baby hospital.  The kids in the photo are Avery, Grant, and our neighbor, Layla.  They all had a blast imagining and playing all morning.